If you want to see a cultural myth, turn on the pre-game show that comes before a Dallas Cowboys football game. Somehow, back in the 1970’s, the Cowboys were given the slogan “America’s Team.” This was also around the time that their then-general manager, Tex Schramm, finagled them a home game every Thanksgiving, in what seems like perpetuity. If you watch that pre-game show, you’ll see images of great Cowboys from the past: Roger Staubach, Tony Dorsett, Troy Aikman and the like. You’ll also see a montage of current Cowboy highlights, and you might even see the fedora-wearing coach Tom Landry, still a legend in Dallas, walking the sideline. The cultural myth, of course, is that the values of the Dallas Cowboys represent those of America, and that the team is the nation’s. From the very beginning of the nation’s existence, myths such as George Washington fessing up after chopping down his father’s cherry tree, because he simply was too honest to tell a lie. This mythic ideal of America as the great Colossus of freedom and opportunity encourages the speaker in Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B,” and it also informs the experiences that surround a character in Bradshaw’s “Reptile Dreams.” A different sort of cultural myth, the ostensible ethos of fraternity men, informs the semiotic nexus of the author of “Making Peace with the Greeks.” Cultural myths are powerful, and they are pervasive. Ultimately, they can turn out to be inspirational – or they can be a hindrance to progress.
One of the most commonly propagated cultural myths about the United States is that it consists of a “melting pot” of people who have gathered from different cultures, around the world, to make up a beautiful tapestry that represents the world’s diversity, getting along in harmony. While many people from other countries have come to the United States and have found prosperity and success, all one has to do is pop “The Gangs of New York” into the DVD or open Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle to see that, for far too many immigrants, the journey to America is expensive and can end up in degradation and despair, after Americans (or even less recent immigrants) do what they can to cheat the new arrivals. The speaker in “Theme for English B” appears to believe in this cultural myth, as he indicates when he talks about the racial identity of the poem: “So will my page be colored that I write?/Being me, it will not be white.” Because the instructor in the poem asks for work that come directly from the individual writer, it will contain that person’s semiotic nexus of stimuli and experiences that shape one’s interpretation of the world. Even if it’s not going to be a “white” poem, though, it will also be “a part of you, instructor./You are white---/yet a part of me, as I am a part of you./That’s American.” This notion of shared identity, across cultural lines, is a part of the myth of the American ideal. Another part of this myth is the notion that a shared American identity has benefits for everyone; as the speaker in the poem says, “Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me./Nor do I often want to be a part of you./But we are, that’s true!/As I learn from you,/I guess you learn from me.” The benefit of a common American identity is that each individual grows and develops because of the wealth of knowledge and experience that comes from interacting with people from other cultural and experiential backgrounds.
In “Making Peace with the Greeks,” an English professor at Clemson University uses this idea of the benefits of a shared identity to overcome her stereotypical notions about the fraternity men in her English class. Admittedly, the young men come into her classroom and act much like high school freshmen instead of the college variety. Of the 22 students in her class, 12 are all from the same fraternity – they all decided to sign up for the same section. When one of them answers a question correctly, the others cheer him on, and they have all come up with raucous nicknames for one another that they constantly holler out in class. This bloc of students has come to dominate the class’ discourse, to the point where the teacher can no longer manage the group. It sounds much like a tenth-grade English class running amok – except it’s on a university campus. While the professor has tended to see fraternity men as slackers in backward baseball caps who generally don’t know how to behave in polite society and certainly don’t know the evils of the split infinitive, she has to overcome this myth of fraternity men in order to help her class move forward. She calls them up after class one day and asks them to help her with the leadership of her class – splitting up, making sure that each small group is staying on task, and coming up with reflective questions instead of inane observations. She couches these requests positively, though, hoping that appealing to the young men’s sense of leadership will help her class make progress. The earnestness with which the young men accept her offer, and the stolidity with which some of them shake her hand on the way out of the room, belie her ideas about the ethics of fraternity men, and they take her requests to heart. As a result, the class moves almost overnight from ninth grade hell to being a positive experience for everyone involved. Realizing that they are not just members of their fraternity but that they are also members of an English class that is larger, embracing their roles within that larger group helps them change their notions of identity when they come into the classroom. As a result, they gain much more from the class than they would have otherwise – and their disruptions keep the rest of the class from missing out on the education that they are paying for. The end result is win-win for all involved.
So how do individuals decide to buy in to particular cultural myths? The store of Clotaire Rapaille, related in Bradsher’s “Reptile Dreams,” shows how affective these myths can be – and how firmly they can be implanted in the individual consciousness. As a very young boy, Rapaille witnessed the occupation of his native France by the hated Germans during World War II. The Germans take his father, who had been in the French Army, and keep him in a labor camp until the war’s end. One day, though, while Rapaille is living with his grandparents, he notices some fleeing Germans and wonders what they might be running from, since they are allegedly the ones in charge of the country. The arrival of an American tank through the trees, routing the Germans, changes his life. When the American soldier invites him up onto the tank after the German flight, offering him candy, Rapaille is instantly convinced, even at the tender age of three, that America is the light of the world. After all, the Americans drove off the mean, cruel Germans and were obviously more powerful than his native culture (France) because they were able to drive the enemy away (instead of vice versa). Rapaille ends up working in market research and develops the idea that one’s first encounter with an institution, person or other experience forms the primary emotional connections between that person and the stimulus. That first experience with the American flag, flying on a tank that was driving the Germans out of his native land, bonded him with America for life.
Cultural myths date back just about as far as history itself. The notion of the Hebrews as God’s chosen people served as the basis for the development of a separate cultural identity and ethos. The cultural myths about the Persian army, as it advanced around the eastern Mediterranean, were so terrifying that many cities and peoples in their path would surrender without a fight. Of course, the group that stopped them, the mighty warriors at Thermopylae, ended up creating cultural myths of their own about the toughness of Sparta. As long as there are cultures, they will propagate myths that will serve to inspire – and may also end up hindering those who believe them.
Sources Consulted
Ashton, Susanna. “Making Peace with the Greeks.” The Chronicle of Higher Education
17 November 2006.
Bradsher, Keith. “Reptile Dreams.”
Hughes, Langston. “Theme for English B.” Web. Retrieved 1 December 2011 from
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/English_B.html
